Curl is one of those command line tools that really does make our lives easier. APIs are expected of everything these days, from your washing machine to cloud management software, and rightly so. This is just a very simple example of using Curl to update a DNS record with an IP address. In this case I use it in my home lab to update a DNS record with my home internet IP address. Unfortunately my ISP doesn’t offer a static IP, but it’s not really a problem. There are free (with limitations) and paid dynamic DNS services out there, but why not do it yourself with a couple of lines of code? [Read more…] about Use Curl and Wget to Make Your Life Easier (DNS API update with external IP)

The third part of this series continues with the vSphere build on my whitebox server, the Asus Rampage II Extreme with Intel Core i7 2.8Ghz and a 120GB SSD. Following on from the video in part 2 where we installed ESXi on to the USB drive, we are now ready to access the physical ESXi host and start creating some virtual machines. Since this is a home vSphere lab environment, accessing the lab from anywhere (not just at home) is a major advantage for me, so I’ll be taking you through the steps to create a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine with an RD Gateway (Remote Desktop Gateway). We will also need shared storage in order to use vMotion, so I will also guide you through the setup of an OpenFiler iSCSI virtual SAN.

Way back when VMware VI3 was released in 2006 (doesn’t time fly!), I built a home-brew lab server for ESX 3.0 and used it partly to study for my VCP exam. That particular machine is now my home theatre PC (HTPC) as it wouldn’t stand a chance of running VMware vSphere, so here is my mission to build a whitebox VMware vSphere lab server. I must also give credit to Simon Seagrave and Simon Gallagher their vSphere lab server articles which have inspired me to do something about it and build a vSphere lab at home. Simon has lots of great articles on building a vSphere lab, and I urge you to visit his site.